Raiders of the Congo

The white men seemed nervous. There were two of them—one tall, one a few inches shorter, both conspicuously "other" from the sea of African faces. The tall one with the goatee carried a green nylon bag that he kept suspiciously close to his body, peering into it several times as he and his partner negotiated with the locals in the dusty parking lot.

The muzungus—that’s the Bantu term for foreigner or, in the literal translation, "aimless wanderer"—needed a ride. That much was clear to Kasimu. But they were struggling to communicate with his boss, the driver of the white Toyota Land Cruiser the white men had singled out among all the beat-up trucks and sedans as big enough and rugged enough to transport them and their broken-down motorcycle across the jungle. At first the muzungus balked at the driver’s price. Then they complained when they realized that Kasimu and his friend Kepo, who needed a lift home to his village, would be riding along. Finally, at about 6:30 p.m. on an early-spring evening in the crumbling colonial city of Kisangani, Congo, all five men piled into the Land Cruiser and settled in for a long drive through the jungle. Kasimu and Kepo shared the open back of the vehicle with the motorcycle—a white Yamaha trail bike—and the tall muzungu. The shorter one rode up front with the driver.

Bad Service: How your phone helps fund the fighting that has led to the worst human death toll since WWII

From the Miners...

A kilo of coltan purchases a prostitute "wife" for the length of a villager’s mining stay (a tin can’s worth buys gonorrhea antibiotics) while family farm rots. Villager averages $4 per day.

...to the Militia Groups...

Outfits like the bloodthirsty Lord’s Resistance Army demand coltan from villagers in exchange for "protection." Militia members rape men and women to instill fear. Men die from genital mutilation, too ashamed to say anything. Militia sells coltan for more guns to maintain dominance.

...to the Traders...

Local brokers trade guns bought from Congolese army for coltan. Soldiers are then paid to move the mineral in 110-pound bags through official checkpoints and illegal border crossings via truck and boat to Rwanda.

...to Rwanda...

Illicit coltan is mid with minerals produced by Rwandan mines.

...to the Chinese processing plant...

Refusing to cooperate with U.N. conflict-free supply-chain initiatives, Chinese smelters purchase and mix undocumented Congolese coltan with other minerals from around the world, making its source impossible to trace. Coltan undergoes chemical processing to produce refined tantalum powder, which is then made into circuit-board capacitors.

...to the Manufacturer...

Electronics assemblers like Foxconn—where labor-camp conditions have led to at least fourteen suicides and, this September, a 2,000-man riot—solder coltan-laced circuits into products ranging from laptops to cell phones.

...to your iPhone

While corporate initiatives and the Dodd-Frank Act—the law mandates U.S. companies certify their products as "DRC conflict free"—curtail coltan in domestic products, Apple acknowledges "there’s still work to be done."

Everyone was quiet as they made their way east across the city, lurching and braking in the evening traffic. Known as Stanleyville a century ago, Kisangani was the centerpiece of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the remote "Inner Station" during the days when Belgium’s King Leopold II was the ultimate gangster, running the Congo as his private rubber plantation. More than a century later, it remains isolated and forgotten, a brooding, malevolent town of demons and diamonds, dreams and decay.

As the Land Cruiser cleared the outskirts of the city and continued east through Equatorial Africa, the group passed lopsided trucks piled high with cargo and a dozen or more Congolese sitting precariously on top. After a half hour or so, the vehicle made a brief stop, and the tall man moved up to the cab to join his friend, leaving the two Congolese alone in the back.

Now only the dim glow of the moon and the occasional fire from an isolated settlement illuminated the rocky dirt track that spanned the dense and sweltering Ituri rain forest. Soon the villages of thatched huts thinned out, leaving long stretches with nothing but watery puddles and gray-black shadows. At around 8 p.m., about sixty-five miles east of Kisangani, the driver slowed down and pulled over.

Kasimu and his Kepo were surprised. Another stop? At this rate, the journey would take forever. The white men got out and stood by the vehicle for a few minutes, conferring, seeming to argue, growing more and more agitated. At one point the shorter one walked toward the back, and Kepo took the opportunity to ask for a light for his cigarette. The man said he didn’t have one. He turned to ask his taller friend, who gestured dismissively and shouted to leave him alone. Moments later, according to both Kasimu and Kepo, the tall muzungu erupted in rage, screaming at the driver: Get out, get out, get out!

Then, suddenly, gunfire.

What the...? Kasimu leaped from the truck bed and tried to flee into the thick bush, but the shorter man grabbed hold of his jacket and yanked him to the ground. The two men tussled, Kasimu struggling to loose himself from the man’s grip. But the muzungu was strong. Finally the tall one motioned to his partner to release the African so he could get a clean shot. And the instant Kasimu felt his attacker relax, he bolted. The tall man raised his weapon, aimed, fired...and missed. Kasimu escaped into the blackness of the jungle.

Kepo, meanwhile, was paralyzed with terror, kneeling by the cab of the Land Cruiser. As the shooter shifted his attention to him, Kepo rose to run. The white man fired, but the shot whizzed over Kepo’s head. "I thought, If I lose control now, I’m going to die," Kepo recalls. Like Kasimu, he managed to escape into the jungle as the white man fired a last errant shot into the dark.

The driver, a 42-year-old husband and father named Abedi Kasongo, was not so fortunate. His limp body now lay in a pool of blood in the middle of the dirt track. Within hours, word would go out to every pygmy village and thatch-roofed hut in the jungle that a local man was dead—and that the two muzungus who’d committed the murder were still out there, somewhere, in the vast green hell of the Ituri.

That’s the Congolese version, anyway, of a deeply strange African murder mystery. It’s a tale of the modern-day eastern Congo, a lawless dystopia ruled by brutal warlords and built on the stooped backs of their enslaved subjects. It’s a war story, too, played against the backdrop of a bloody and seemingly endless conflict over land and minerals—specifically gold, diamonds, and coltan, a metallic ore that’s inside your smartphone and a vast array of other electronic devices. And it’s a story of two white Europeans who, like generations of their colonial forebears, saw nuggets of opportunity amidst the chaos.

On Saturday, May 2, 2009, a pair of former soldiers from Norway named Joshua French and Tjostolv "Mike" Moland pushed their white mud-splattered motorcycle into Kisangani after a 600-mile trek across the eastern Congo. (The bike had survived about 599 of those miles before finally succumbing to the relentless pounding of the jungle roads.) They checked into room 23 at the Riviera, a small $65-a-night white stucco hotel with free breakfast and a pleasant outdoor café along the tree-shaded Avenue Bondekwe. What was their business in Kisangani? The answer to that question remains as murky as the Congo River. But a few days later, they were urgently looking for a way out—a search that led them to Kasongo and his Land Cruiser.

Mike Moland was a 28-year-old veteran of the Norwegian military with right-wing views, a hot temper, and an imposing six-foot-plus frame to back it up. After leaving the army, he’d bounced around the world on low-level private-security jobs. In Arizona, he worked on the construction of security fences near the border with Mexico; in Zambia and South Africa, he did some anti-poaching gigs; he says he got his first taste of the Congo in 2005, as a bodyguard for an Austrian businessman.

Joshua French was a year younger, a few inches shorter, and several degrees mellower than his friend. The son of an English father and a Norwegian mother, French had joined Norway’s elite Army Telemark Battalion in early 2007, hoping to be sent to Afghanistan to fight alongside U.S. and other NATO forces. But with so few Norwegian troops being sent into combat, it seemed like his time would never come, and in the spring he decided to call it quits. On April 12, he climbed the stairs of the battalion’s headquarters in Rena, took a seat, and waited to give his notice. Sitting next to him was Mike Moland, who had re-enlisted and been assigned to guard the royal palace in Oslo. Bored with this post, Moland had decided to apply for admission into Telemark, the elite unit French was leaving. The two connected immediately and became fast friends.

Around that time, Moland had been quietly moonlighting as a security consultant for a Norwegian company called Special Intervention Group, now defunct. He enjoyed the work and had lately been thinking about quitting the military (again) and going to Uganda to open a local office for the firm. He shared the idea with French, who saw it as a great opportunity. So in the fall of 2007, Moland and French decamped for Kampala, the capital of Uganda, a cosmopolitan city where English was widely spoken and shadowy "security" firms—a polite term for mercenaries, some employed on the African continent, others exported to places like Iraq and Afghanistan—were allowed to proliferate. Moland and French rented an office suite in a business park next to a Sheraton, using pseudonyms (Mike Callan and John Hunt) on their business cards, ID badges, and the building’s directory in the lobby.

They lived at Backpackers, a low-cost hostel and campground, complete with resident monkeys, about ten minutes from the center of the city. And they were secretive about their "assignments," says John Hunwick, the Australian-born owner of Backpackers, coming and going at strange hours, often in the middle of the night. They spoke of having trouble obtaining an official license from the government to operate SIG-Uganda and appeared to be casting about for other ways to profit from the instability and mineral wealth of the region. According to Hunwick, one man they seemed especially keen on meeting was Laurent Nkunda, the charismatic Christian warlord who was then the Congo’s most wanted man. "They were asking me how could we contact Nkunda," Hunwick told me as we strolled through the compound. "I said, ’How would I know? I have no idea.’ They said, ’We just want to talk to him.’ "

They were not alone in this desire. Many, many Africans would also have loved a word with Nkunda, who, by 2009, had been waging war, with occasional breaks, for more than a decade. Tall and thin with sharp, angular features, his skin a smooth mocha, often dressed in tailored military garb and sunglasses, the Pentecostal minister and former schoolteacher claimed to lead a rebel uprising against oppressive Congolese and U.N. forces. In reality, the conflict was a war of rape, torture, and enslavement for land, natural resources, and power. By the time the young Norwegians took an interest, the strongman preacher had already seized control of large swaths of the eastern Congo. His goal, or at least his threat, was to push westward toward the capital of Kinshasa, overthrow President Joseph Kabila, and seize control of the entire country. But Nkunda did not operate alone. The even more powerful man behind him, secretly supplying troops and weapons, was Paul Kagame, the president of neighboring Rwanda. After launching two very bloody but unsuccessful wars for control of the Congo, Kagame was now secretly using Nkunda as his proxy for a third try.

Little known and poorly understood in the West, the seemingly endless bloodshed—awkwardly known as the First Congo War, the Second Congo War, and the 2008 Nord-Kivu fighting—has uprooted hundreds of thousands of civilians and caused what the U.N. called "a humanitarian crisis of catastrophic dimensions." While neither the rebels nor the government forces are innocent (alleged atrocities are common to both sides), Nkunda has earned special infamy. He has allegedly conscripted child soldiers as young as 12, and his forces were accused of massacring 160 people in Kisangani in 2002. According to human-rights groups, his troops routinely seized control of entire civilian villages, raping the women and forcing the villagers to dig, often with their bare hands, for rocks containing gold, diamonds, and coltan, also known as "gray gold." The "blood diamonds" of the tech world, coltan contains tantalum, essential for low-cost cell phones, laptops, and many other gadgets. Over half of the world’s tantalum is found in Africa, a significant percentage of it sitting under the ground that Laurent Nkunda controlled.

With the money from his minerals—and additional backing from Kagame—Nkunda was able to buy more weapons and ammunition to conquer more territory, thus establishing a continuous "kill chain" stretching from villagers working at gunpoint in a Congolese mine to the hands of middle schoolers in suburban Chicago tapping out text messages to their friends. Unheard of by most Americans addicted to their devices and seldom reported in the news, the rush for coltan in the Congo has been a major contributor to the deadliest conflict since World War II. Les Pillages, they call it. As many as 4 million dead since the late ’90s.

For years, Moland and French had greatly admired the progress made by Paul Kagame in rebuilding Rwanda after the genocide of the ’90s, and they hoped to be part of Nkunda’s efforts to wage war on President Kabila and extend Kagame’s power over all of the Congo. Soon after setting up shop in Kampala, Mike Moland wrote Nkunda a letter, a copy of which I obtained from the chief of military intelligence in Uganda. "Honorable General Laurent Nkunda," it began, "I have, through following the situation in the Eastern Congo, come to believe that you are the right man to lead this massive country, into the future it deserves.... We wish to offer our services and our support to you General. We are a small and very secretive company which has a front company in Uganda, from where we operate.... We can also provide you with field intelligence and human intelligence gathering behind your enemy’s lines.... I know you will understand the value of Europeans working as information gatherers; who would ever suspect?" But Moland was interested in becoming more than just the warlord’s spy-for-hire. He wanted to be made a full-fledged commander in his rebel army, leading troops into battle against Congolese government forces. "Give me a command and I will be your loyal servant," he wrote.

In the moments after Kepo Ayilla and Kasimu Aradjabu fled into the jungle, French either stepped over the body of the driver, Abedi Kasongo, possibly still clinging to life, or pulled him out and pushed him to the ground, depending on whose story you believe. In any case, French then climbed into the cab as thick, sticky-wet blood streamed down the inside of the door and the driver’s seat.

In Moland and French’s version, the Land Cruiser had been attacked by "bandits" who emerged from the jungle when Kasongo pulled the vehicle over. The Norwegians say they were taking the opportunity to relieve themselves on the side of the road when they heard gunfire.

"It was dark, but not pitch dark," says French, who did most of the talking about what happened next when I interviewed both men in the Kisangani prison where they were being held. "We heard shots, and it took us about half a second to react. We ran in front of the car, heard another shot, and then ran to the left side of the car, backwards down the middle of the road. Then we heard more shots, and we kept running. The engine was still running and the lights were still on, so obviously we didn’t run up the road into the lights. We ran backwards into the dark.

"After about twenty or thirty meters," French continues, "someone intercepted me from my left, a skinny little black man [not, he says, Kepo or Kasimu]. We had a rough tumble for one or two seconds. I’ve done martial arts for quite a few years, so I was on my feet rapidly, and he decided that whatever he was attempting to do wasn’t a good idea. I did a fake charge on him, and he ran off into the woods."

At this point, he says, they ran back to the Land Cruiser. Moland jumped into the open bed and grabbed the shotgun from his bag—"for our own security," French says—while French approached the driver’s side. "I saw someone lying on the ground," French continues. "There was a lot of blood on the seat."

He got in and stepped on the gas, leaving Kasongo’s body in the middle of the road. He claims their first priority was to seek help but that they couldn’t get a cell signal. But they never sought any help—not even when they came to a military checkpoint in the village of Bafwasende, about two hours later. "They just passed us through," said French. "We didn’t stop to try to talk to them because my French and his [Moland’s] French was limited. We knew that the situation would be taken advantage of by the Congolese against us—we just knew. This is how Africa works."

After another hour or so, they reached the village of Nia-Nia, a crossroads where one dirt track leads north toward South Sudan and another heads east toward Uganda. French took the eastern road and again pulled over about a mile later. "We stopped the car because I was sitting in brains and guts, driving," says French. "There was a small pit of water in the road, and we decided, because it was getting smelly in the cockpit, to stop the car and wash out my seat."

As Moland started cleaning the blood from the front seat, French picked up his camera. "I said, ’Hold on a minute, I want to take a picture of the cockpit before anything,’ " he told me. "My intention was to have a clear picture of the inside of the car, undisturbed, before we washed everything clean—at least we’d have a picture of exactly how it looked originally. The problem is, as I took the picture, our reaction as soldiers is, to be honest with you, we don’t cry or get afraid from danger; we laugh and mock it. So I said ’cheese’ or something, and Moland turned to me and smiled."

"Dark humor," Moland chimes in.

They drove for four more hours. At 3:30 a.m., they stopped in the village of Epulu and at a wildlife preserve for okapi—a rare species that’s a cross between a zebra and a giraffe—and they again considered telling the authorities what had happened. But there were several Congolese passenger buses parked at the station, they say, and this changed the situation. "We did not feel comfortable with all these people, a car full of blood, and probably some guys after us. If there had been only the rangers there, we probably would have stopped and explained ourselves. But there were lots of people—sitting by fires, walking around. We didn’t like the atmosphere. Somebody could just turn against you."

Instead, they say, they decided to camp nearby and return in the morning. They drove another half hour and turned onto a nearly hidden dirt track; with few drivable roads, it would only be a matter of time before someone spotted the white Toyota Land Cruiser. Deep in the bush, they stopped and pitched their tent. By not continuing any farther that night, French says, "this proves our intention of going back to Epulu. Otherwise we would have just driven off eastwards." But by then it was about 4 a.m., and fatigue likely played a role in their decision to stop.

They also ditched Moland’s weapon, a camouflaged Italian-made Benelli short-barreled shotgun with a stock that had been replaced with a pistol grip. Why?

"First of all, it was malfunctioning, so we could only shoot two shots with it," French says. "It was an extremely limited self-defense weapon. Also, we didn’t want to be armed for a firefight. If we had a shotgun, they would be much more likely to shoot us than if we were unarmed."

Moland and French woke up in their small blue pup tent on Wednesday morning at around eight, after just a few hours’ sleep. They say they tried to return to Epulu but that—again—something happened that changed their plans.

"As we turned out on the road, we saw a blue truck blocking the road westwards, towards Epulu, and this gave us a very, very bad feeling," French says. Instead they turned east, drove for about two miles, and stopped in the remote pygmy village of Koki. According to the village chief, Roger Matongo, they asked for water but took off before buying any when the blue truck caught up.

French: "It screeched to a halt, and off jumped ten or twelve guys. A couple of them had handguns and machetes, and they were running in our direction."

So they jumped back in the car and sped off again, back toward Epulu. But if they returned to Epulu, they realized, they’d surely be caught. "We were bod in," says Moland.

Desperate now, and worried about being shot or hacked to death, they decided to turn off the road and head back into the Ituri rain forest. They abandoned the car (and their motorcycle) at the same place they’d camped, gathered up a compass, map, and a few other items, and then set off on foot. "We had all our kits pre-packed," says French. "Grabbed the backpack and straight into the jungle. Sixty kilometers or so to Mambasa."

For days Moland and French hiked, jogged, and ran through the Ituri in an area where members of the Lord’s Resistance Army—the small but fanatical Christian guerilla movement led by Joseph Kony and made famous by the Kony 2012 viral video—have been known to engage in cannibalism. Chewing on roots and sipping from tea-colored streams, they hid beneath the towering canopy that in places was so thick that only tiny slivers of light broke through. Gigantic trees, some more than fifteen stories high, rose like hardwood skyscrapers with roots running down their sides and across the forest floor like fire hoses, creating a labyrinth of hidden bumps and twists that occasionally sent Moland and French flying. Then there was the constant noise, day and night, like the wailing at a funeral. It was the maddening sound of a myriad variety of insects: the cicadas with their buzzing chant, and armies of ants that marched in columns, emitting a crackle as they broke apart the bodies of any insect in their path. Grotesque spiders the size of saucers hung in massive webs that stretched between trees like giant fishnets.

By Friday they had been on the run for three days. Shoving aside thick branches, tripping over dead trees, stumbling into muddy streams, they were barely able to see their hands in front of them. And then there were the snakes, including the Gaboon viper, a six-foot tube of deadly venom with two-inch fangs as a delivery system. The Congolese army was on full alert throughout the Ituri, with soldiers and police posted to most villages, searching for the pair. Rangers from Epulu were tracking them, too, and they soon discovered that Moland and French would sometimes leave the bush at night and walk along isolated dirt paths that snaked through the jungle. So the rangers began posting people late at night to watch for them. And at around 2 a.m. on Saturday, May 9, about twenty-one miles from Mambasa, a dog barked, and lights from a car caught the pair.

"We were walking through a village very quietly," French says, "and they just opened fire on us from about twelve feet away. No questions asked, just opened fire with AK-47’s." They began to run, Moland in front and French behind, with five Congolese army soldiers in pursuit. (It was French’s turn to carry the heavier of their two water canteens, slowing him down.) A few bullets hit Moland’s rucksack, putting holes in his canteen and obliterating a supply of bananas, but he managed to disappear into the jungle. As French watched two of the soldiers dive into the bush after his friend, he attempted to take cover in a roadside ditch.

Moland sprinted into the woods and tried to make himself invisible. "Into the darkness, down, lie still—they will never find me. I double-checked myself for any bullet wounds. No blood, okay. I just continued to lie still. Shit, Joshua’s not here. And they just kept firing. They shoot, and they shot, and they shot. It was very dark. And they kept on shooting."

Moments later, French realized he was surrounded by all five men—the two who’d been pursuing Moland had given up and returned to the road—so he decided to surrender. "I shouted out, then they brutally arrested me," he says. "I was on my knees. One of the guys continued firing around me. The commander says, ’Maybe I’ll just kill you right now,’ and the other guy picks up his gun and shoots two shots right next to me."

Moland says he heard it all: "I’m lying dead still. I heard the capture and a lot of rumbling, and then I heard two shots and then just this eerie quiet. I thought they ecuted him. That’s when I snuck off." French also assumed the worse. "I thought Mike had been killed in the jungle. Later, we realized that the orders were to kill us, but because Mike got away, they were fearful of killing me in case he got out of the country. He would be an eyewitness. But if we had both been captured at that point, they would have ecuted us both with a bullet straight through the brain."

As French was hauled off to military intelligence in Kisangani for interrogation, Moland continued through the jungle for another three days. But with little sleep, consumed by insects, baking in the heat, and now with only a cup for water, he grew more and more desperate. Nevertheless, convinced his partner was dead and that he was now all alone, he continued ever deeper into the darkness, using his compass to guide him east and avoiding any contact with local villages. By the morning of Tuesday, May 12, Moland—exhausted, dehydrated, starving, weak—had been on the run for six days, half of that time completely alone.

Meanwhile, news of French’s capture had trickled back to Norway. That morning, Moland’s father, Knut, received a call from his local sheriff. "Knut called me and said Joshua had been arrested, but nobody knows where Tjostolv is," his mother, Mathilde Moland, told me when I visited her in Veg&#xE5;rshei, Norway, where Moland grew up. "That’s when I got very, very anxious."

Moland had his phone but no coverage, so he’d turned it off to save the battery. Now, realizing he was only a few miles from Mambasa, he decided to take a chance and see if he could get a signal. "Tuesday morning, Tjostolv calls his father saying he is on the run in the jungle and his father had to help him," Mathilde says.

At the time, according to Moland’s sister, Carolina, he was thinking about trying to make it out of the Congo. "He was thinking of running through the jungle to Uganda but realized it would be way, way too far," she says. Instead, his father advised him to turn himself in, and he agreed to do so.

The problem was staying alive long enough to surrender. "I surrendered to this school, this Islamic school," Moland says. "I gave a guy a hundred dollars to escort me to the police station." But after the villagers saw Moland and realized who he was, a mob quickly formed and followed him all the way to the door, threatening and jeering at him all the way. Even more harrowing was the ride back to Kisangani. "The news had gone out on the radio," Moland says, "and in every village I was paraded down the street. People had handguns, machetes. They were pointing and screaming, even making threats of cannibalism."

Back in Kisangani, both Moland and French were held as military prisoners and charged with murder and espionage. While neither remained in the Norwegian army, both were carrying active-duty military identification cards when arrested. (One was due to expire in 2016, the other in 2017.) And this, apparently, was enough to convince Congolese officials that they were spies—or worse.

"We knew for sure that these people were well-trained for intelligence," Thomas Mesemo, Congo’s chief of intelligence in Kisangani, told me. He then went on to spin a theory that probably says a lot more about the well-founded suspicion of Europeans in the Congo than any credible plot hatched by Moland and French. "I don’t really consider them as spies but as terrorists," he told me. "I believe they came for a commando mission." Their target, he mused, might have been President Joseph Kabila, whose father was gunned down by an assassin and who was planning a visit to Kisangani the following month. "One of the theories was that Moland and French were planning to assassinate President Kabila as he drove down the road [from the airport] to Kisangani." Part of the plot, Mesemo said, involved the murder of Kasongo. "Because the driver could be a witness. The people in the car learned they had the weapons. They had a plan to kill the people in the car and maybe put the car somewhere and make their plan to assassinate the president, because it was only some days before the president uses the road."

Following hours of interrogation, Moland and French were locked up in the military prison, a decrepit building where they and half a dozen other inmates were packed in a cell with a single bucket for a toilet. Light, as well as ventilation in the one- hundred-degree-plus heat, came from two small holes in the roof. "It was a dungeon," says French.

"We had typhoid fever, light malaria, intestinal worms," adds Moland. "Terrible stomach pain, and then they deny you the toilet. When they finally let you go to the toilet, they stand there and poke you with a bayonet. That was out of a B movie."

They were held there for two months. In mid-July they were moved to Kisangani’s decaying red-brick Central Prison, built by the Belgians in the 1920s to house Congolese prisoners, and conditions gradually improved. The cell they shared was basically a small room with mold-mottled stone walls and a door that opened to the inner prison grounds. Still, there was no plumbing, only an odorous common drainage ditch with stagnant water.

Outside the walls of the prison, the military prosecutor was building his case. In a stroke of luck, a barefoot pygmy discovered the hidden shotgun while hunting for honey. Moland couldn’t believe his bad luck: "Like a needle in a haystack, a pygmy found it in the jungle."

On Friday, August 14, 2009, Moland and French did the Congo equivalent of a perp walk. Handcuffed together as they emerged from the battered powder blue steel door of the prison, they were marched for several miles through the center of Kisangani. Like a military parade, scores of heavily armed soldiers in olive fatigues with red scarves and berets marched along on both sides of the street—more for the protection of the prisoners than to prevent their escape. Along the entire route, locals followed on both sides of the street, occasionally throwing coins at the Norwegians as a symbol of the bloody history of occupation and slavery.

Their destination was the Franco-Congolaise Cultural Alliance Center, a three-story auditorium, cultural center, and courthouse. Gleaming under a fresh coat of creamy-white paint, the center was a place with great historical significance. One hundred and five years earlier, King Leopold II had it built to provide a fig leaf of legal legitimacy for his brutal treatment of the local Congolese forced to work in his rubber plantations. At the time, there were hundreds of Norwegians running operations in Kisangani, then Stanleyville. According to a 1905 report, "Already by 1889 it was exclusively Scandinavians, and predominantly Danes, who ran the river transport.... It was the Swedish, Norwegian and Danish captains, first mates, chiefs and ship mechanics who in reality made the Belgian conquest of the Congo possible." And the first judge to sit in the new courthouse was a Norwegian, Vilhelm Mariboe Aubert, who once wrote that "the tropical Negro" was "the laziest of anyone that has ever been created since the dawn of time in the likeness of God!" Aubert’s cure was the chicotte, a bullwhip made of hippopotamus hide used to flog anyone showing any resistance. "To put a Negro in a prison," he noted, "is the same as giving him great pleasure. Then he can enjoy his laziness."

Outside the old courthouse, amid a mass of soldiers and police, there was a giant traffic jam as members of Congo’s drivers’ union showed their support for their fallen comrade. Finally, shortly before 9 a.m., Moland and French stood up. Tattered, disheveled, and bearded, with thick mops of dark hair, the two hadn’t come into contact with a razor or even a change of clothes in the three months since their arrest. Because of their military connections and the espionage charge, the two were facing a military trial rather than a civil one; their fate would be decided not by a jury but rather by a majority vote of five military judges.

The trial took nearly a month. Moland and French sat on white plastic chairs while behind them as many as 300 spectators filled the gallery, among them Kasongo’s widow, who often attended the trial with her infant child. During breaks, the music of Céline Dion played in the background, and during long recesses, videos would sometimes be shown on a large screen behind the judges’ chairs. At one point, Moland and French sat in the courtroom watching an episode of Prison Break.

Slow at the beginning, the proceedings gathered momentum as the military prosecutor, Colonel Roger Wabara, presented his case—the shotgun found in the jungle; the testimony of the other two men in the Land Cruiser, Kasimu Aradjabu and Kepo Ayilla; and vague but suspicious text messages, like this one from Moland to French: "DO NOT USE ANYONE’S NAME AT ALL." But the most dramatic moment came when the prosecution displayed a large photo of Kasongo’s lifeless body lying in the back of the truck used to bring him back to Kisangani, and then the grotesque photo of Moland smiling like a jackal as he cleaned pools of the driver’s blood from the seat of the truck. With that, the gallery erupted in fury, Kasongo’s widow began weeping, and his sister fainted and had to be carried out of the courtroom.

When questioned by the prosecution, both Moland and French refused to cooperate, accusing the government of altering their interrogation transcripts to better fit their case. "This is a legal farce," said Moland, "which I do not want to participate in. I will not answer questions. This is a political trial. It is my right not to answer questions." French did the same.

Summing up, the prosecutor accused the two of being spies and described Moland as a snake. "He is calm," he said, "but if he bites you, you die." French, he said, "is proud because he comes from a wealthy family. He thinks he can come here and kill people and go home to Norway." He then asked the court to impose the death penalty on both.

André Kimbambe, one of the Norwegians’ two defense attorneys, rose to deliver his summation. He called the espionage charges "a joke" and explained away the photo as evidence that the pair had cleaned a car, not committed a murder. (No autopsy was ever performed on Kasongo’s body; therefore there was no forensic evidence that Moland’s gun was the murder weapon.) Kimbambe gamely tried to sell Moland and French’s version—that the murder was committed by bandits who emerged from the jungle and vanished just as quickly.

A week later, on September 8, the judges handed down their verdict: Moland and French were guilty of all charges. Congo’s attorney general then announced that the country was seeking an eye-popping $5 billion from the Norwegian government as compensation for the espionage committed by its citizens. (The fine was later changed to $60 million, representing one dollar for every Congolese citizen.) Finally, at 1:10 p.m., the Céline Dion music was turned off, Moland and French were ordered to stand, and the judge condemned them both to death for each of the five counts of which they were found guilty: willful murder, attempted murder, armed robbery, attempting to form a criminal association, and espionage on behalf of Norway.

Meanwhile, the Ugandan government had been conducting its own investigation of the defendants. A search of Moland’s computer turned up a copy of the letter he had written to Laurent Nkunda, which Ugandan intelligence interpreted as an offer to trade information for precious metals and minerals from mines under Nkunda’s control. (It’s unknown whether Nkunda ever even received Moland’s letter, much less took him up on his offer.) Investigators also found detailed maps of Kisangani—including notations on the U.N. compound and military installations, the streets around the diamond district, and the Hotel Palais, a tall building with a collection of communications antennas on the roof—as well as surveillance photos, taken on March 17 and March 18, 2008, of Kisangani’s central bank. These photos offer a compelling clue to an unsolved mystery: What, exactly, were Moland and French doing in Kisangani?

Soon after arriving in Kampala in 2007, the pair placed an ad on the Internet for a third partner—"operations officer, East Africa"—to help them establish their firm. Answering the ad was a man who claimed to be a former British paratrooper with eight years in the army followed by several years of experience as a private military contractor in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Sudan, and Somalia, among other places. I found him in England, and we met at a pub near Birmingham. Still admittedly involved in illegal work in Africa, including buying blood diamonds and blood gold from the Congo and elsewhere, he asked that his name not be revealed. I’ll call him Nigel.

Nigel says that before he left England, French made an odd request. Without explanation, he sent Nigel an e-mail asking him to acquire and bring three U.N. uniforms. Nigel said he had no trouble purchasing pieces of the official uniforms from the website of the London company Silvermans Limited. (The patches cost &#xA3;14.99 apiece, the berets &#xA3;12.99.) Once he arrived in Kampala in late March 2008, Nigel said he was briefed on their mission: "Moland said we were going to rob a bank in Kisangani, which is what the U.N. uniforms were for. Eight thousand U.N. troops in Kisangani, something like that. They’re not going to shoot at one of their own, are they? Especially not a white guy." (The surveillance photographs of the bank that were later discovered by Ugandan investigators had been taken only a week or so before Nigel arrived in Kampala.) The robbery, he said Moland told him, was on behalf of a client whose name Moland had agreed to keep secret. And the bank, he added, was supposedly laundering money for some unnamed bad guys, giving the operation a layer of moral and political cover.

Not that Nigel seemed to require that. When I asked if he’d agreed to take part in the robbery, he didn’t hesitate. "Yeah, I did," he said. "It all comes down to what you’re prepared to do at the end of the day. Life’s cheap in Africa. You roll into the bank. Anybody even looks in your direction wrong, you blow them away." But he felt confident that the uniforms would guarantee a successful escape. "That part of the world, if you look like U.N., for all intents and purposes you are U.N. It can get you out of so much trouble.... You look just like every other U.N. troop. In a force that large, in a place as unorganized as Congo, they haven’t got any means, really, to check."

The identity of the mysterious client, if there even was one, is something Nigel was never able to discover, though he stresses that Moland often boasted of his connection to Nkunda. At any rate, there’s no evidence that Moland and French ever actually attempted the bank heist. Then, a few months after arriving in Kampala, Nigel got into a financial dispute with Moland and French and returned to England.

John Hunwick, the owner of Backpackers, remembers Nigel well: "He wasn’t a bad lad, obviously ex-military, just one of the lads. I don’t know what happened, but they had an enormous argument, and Moland and French told me they put him on a plane and sent him back."

A day after the Norwegians’ sentencing, Moland and French appealed, and in November 2009 they were granted a new trial—one that turned out to be even stranger and more dramatic than the first. Moland appeared to be losing his mind. There were outbursts and mood swings, possibly from the malaria affecting his brain or maybe from too much quinine used to treat it. And then one day, to the shock of everyone, he confessed.

"I did it for ideological reasons," he said. "I think that Nkunda is the right person to lead the country." He also expressed his nostalgia for the Africa of white colonial rule when he saluted the "liberation" of Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, from Great Britain in 1965. (What followed were years of brutal oppression under the government of Ian Smith.)

Around the same time, Moland had a meeting with the victim’s mother, Amina Abdalah, as well as his widow, Bibishe Olendjeke, and several other people in which he reiterated his confession. Giving only the most cryptic of reasons, he implied that it had something to do with the war. "I was the one who shot him and dragged him out of the car," he said. "Your son is innocent. He died for the conflict in Congo. I’m sorry."

Finally he signed a written confession that was read in court. "I ask for forgiveness," he wrote. "It is I who killed Abedi Kasongo." The judge asked Moland if he had written the confession, and Moland answered in the affirmative.

French, however, continued to deny the murder. He claimed Moland was hallucinating and that Kasongo was murdered by the bandits who attacked the Land Cruiser. Then, in a twist on the twist, Moland recanted and said the confession was a result of his deteriorated mental state and his illness.

One person never called as a witness, however, was Moland’s girlfriend in Uganda, a half-Lebanese, half-Ugandan woman in her early twenties named Jamilla Kalifala. "I love him so much, and I miss him," she told me in Kampala. Kalifala says that just before Moland turned himself in, after running for nearly a week through the jungle, he called her, just as he had called his father, but that she missed the call. "Then he sent me a [text] message," she says. " ’Jamilla, I’m going to surrender. I’m going to take myself to the police station, because it was an accident. I didn’t mean it.’ "

Which would mean that long before he was supposedly having malarial hallucinations, Mike Moland confessed the killing to his lover.

In the end, both men were found guilty yet again, with Moland receiving five death sentences and French four—a sentence later upheld by yet another trial in June 2010, their third and final appeal.

At this point, their legal journey appears to have reached an end. "After the last verdict, and with the help of their Norwegian lawyer, they wrote a letter to ask for mercy from the president," says Guillaume Likwela, a local attorney who initially represented both defendants and later only French. "There is no answer so far, which means the verdict is confirmed: They are sentenced to death. But since the death penalty hasn’t been used in Congo under Kabila, they are probably sentenced to life."

There remains, of course, one last nagging question: Why? Why would Moland shoot the person who was transporting him, his friend, and their broken motorcycle to their destination? Possibly because Kasongo wasn’t, in fact, planning to transport them all the way to where they thought they were going. Instead, the driver intended to drop his clients in the middle of the night in a small village about 125 miles shy of their desired destination, collect the other half of his $400 fee, and return to Kisangani. Because that’s what he believed they wanted.

According to three people with knowledge of the ride—Kasimu Aradjabu, Kepo Ayilla, and the brother of the owner of the car—the deal was to take Moland and French to Nia-Nia, a village only about two-thirds of the way to Mambasa, where the Norwegians actually wanted to go. French insists he said Mambasa and that he felt confident that Kasongo understood.

In other words, it’s very likely that Abedi Kasongo’s life was, quite literally, lost in translation.

Moland or French likely learned the troubling news not long after leaving Kisangani, either from bits and pieces of conversation with the passengers or with Kasongo. When Moland moved from the truck bed to the cab eight miles outside Kisangani, he may have attempted to persuade Kasongo to continue all the way to Mambasa. But Kasongo, even if he agreed, would have no doubt charged them considerably more, since it would have been much farther and an overnight trip. And by then, Moland and French’s funds were severely limited.

Thus they may have thought they were being swindled. Angry, afraid of being dumped in the middle of nowhere with a broken bike, possibly drunk and belligerent from the Primus beers they’d been drinking at their hotel café, they may have been hoping to either scare Kasongo into taking them all the way to Mambasa or commandeer the car and compete the journey themselves—a journey they believed they had paid for. Hence the threat by Moland at mile sixty-five and the order to ’Get out, get out, get out!’ Then a little too much pressure on the trigger...and instead of a threat, they had an accidental murder, and witnesses that had to be silenced.

Ultimately, then, the murder was not the glorious, heroic stuff of the mercenary novels stacked in Moland and French’s prison cell; or an elaborate plot to assassinate Kabila, as speculated by Congolese intelligence; or a Tarantino-esque script to rob the central bank of Kisangani, as originally told to Nigel. Instead, it was likely the banal and senseless killing of an innocent African husband and father at the hands of Europeans frightened at the prospect of being left in the jungle.

It was, in other words, straight out of a history book or Heart of Darkness, not a spy novel or a screenplay: Europeans venturing into the wilds of Africa for adventure and profit, leaving behind blood and orphans. Today it’s mineral wealth, not rubber, that fuels the fighting and the chaos: the diamonds that Moland and French may have sought for joining Nkunda’s war; the gold that Nigel buys from illegal traders on his trips to the Congo; and, increasingly, the "gray gold"—coltan—that passes through corrupt middlemen to the West in order to power electronic devices to which we’re hopelessly tethered. The players may have changed in the century since Conrad wrote his masterpiece, but the West is no less oblivious to the bloody origins of the coveted commodities we need to sustain our lifestyles—and no less complicit in the deaths of innocent Africans, including Abedi Kasongo, who get caught in the crossfire.

"Ah, bonjour, Marcel," said Joshua French as a man smiled and walked into the cell with what appeared to be a grocery bag. "That’s just our food coming in for the day. Merci." Two and a half years into their sentence, Moland and French had become the kings of Central Prison, one-eyed men in the land of the blind. "We run this place," said French, without much exaggeration. With money from family, friends, and supporters, including a family-run website for donations, they had turned their cell into the most comfortable—by far—of the scores and scores of cells, many of which hold scores and scores of inmates, in this wretched old place.

It was September 29, 2011, when I finally made my way to see them in their jail cell after tracing their entire journey through the jungle, from Kampala to Kisangani. We sat on blue plastic chairs in their two-man cell at Kisangani’s Central Prison. Outside their front door, which opened onto the prison yard, the sky had become very dark, and it suddenly erupted, turning the reddish dirt into a sea of mud. Hundreds of inmates began yelling loudly in Lingala and Swahili. Moland smiled and said, "Now you see chaos, because they think it’s easier to escape when it rains." Two chickens wandered past the open door. French laughed and told me that he and Moland had purchased them in order to have something other than humans to look at and then named them Winnie Mandela and Idi Amin.

Both men, the only whites in a prison population of about 450, had trimmed hair and were neatly dressed in casual civilian clothes; there were no prison uniforms. "I’ve actually taken some experiences from those who were here a hundred years ago, and that was to stay civilized to keep your sanity: Dress nice, clean the room, do your sports," Moland said. French added, "We stay clean because it affects your mentality—how I present myself to him and how he presents himself to me. If I see he’s clean and tidy, my world is clean and tidy. And the other way around."

Accepting the stark reality of their situation, they said, was critical to maintaining their sanity. Thus they began learning Swahili and Lingala; they set up a small clinic, with medicine sent from Norway, to help other inmates; and they gave up smoking and feeling sorry for themselves. "The first stage is the shock stage," said French. "That was our first encounter, when we were roughly treated and almost killed. Then you come into the stage of denial, where you deny what’s happening to you: ’This is ridiculous;. It will probably end in three weeks or so. It must be over in a month.’ And you actually try to convince yourself, the deniability stage. And then you end up in the accept stage. And that’s were we are now. We’ve accepted that we are prisoners of war as far as we’re concerned. And that’s when you can start working on the positive, problem-solving side of things."

Now, however, they have a new reality and more problems to solve. In late November 2011, on the eve of the Congo’s presidential election, a riot broke out in Central Prison. Inmates, frustrated by the deplorable conditions and hoping to bring attention to the situation, stormed the main gate, rampaged through the administrative offices, and made a bonfire of the prison records. When the police and military responded in force, firing into the prison yard and seriously wounding a number of inmates, the prisoners drove them back for several days with rocks and bricks as eleven managed to escape over the high prison walls. (All but two were quickly captured.) As the violence continued, Moland sent me video of the fighting with his hidden mobile phone, along with a text message reminding me of a comment he’d made about their only option if they were not released. "As I said when you left," he noted, "we die fighting."

On December 1, a few days after prison officials worked out a truce with the inmates, Moland and French were told to pack up their things. Although neither was suspected of playing a role in the riot, the Congolese authorities knew what bad publicity would come if two white prisoners were to die during another prison revolt. The next day, accompanied by armed soldiers, they were flown to Congo’s capital of Kinshasa and transported to the city’s tough Ndolo Prison, reserved for military and police prisoners. The former kings of Central Prison were then stripped of nearly all belongings, including their cell phones, tossed into a small noisy cell with four other inmates, and beaten by the guards.

Also worrisome is the ever present potential for new conflict in the Congo. Should Kabila one day be overthrown or killed, Moland and French, with a combined total of nine death sentences over their heads, might be one step closer to the firing squad. Such concerns have driven French’s mother to make a direct appeal to Prime Minister David Cameron, since French also holds British citizenship. "I request of the British Prime Minister to ask His Excellency President Kabila for a full pardon for my son," Kari Hilde French wrote in April. "My son and his friend face ecution or life imprisonment, which in reality means death, and they deserve the full and unwavering support of their governments." Her plea has so far been ignored, as have numerous overtures by the Norwegian government. This spring, Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg sent a letter to President Kabila asking for information on Moland and French. The letter went unanswered. And in September in New York, during the opening session of the United Nations General Assembly, the Norwegian foreign minister met with his Congolese counterpart and requested a transfer or pardon, but he received little encouragement. Moland and French’s Norwegian attorney, Morten Furuholmen has several times asked the Norwegian government to become more actively engaged in the case, calling the condition of the two "serious and intolerable." And, in a phone call from the prison in mid-October, Moland told me that there is a chance for a 2013 pardon, but they weren’t getting their hopes up. "We don’t really have too much expectation that it will work," he said. "If it does, it will be fantastic, but we just have to see." Meanwhile, they struggle to survive from one day to the next.

"That’s the thing about being in Africa," French told me in Kisangani. "Africa doesn’t adapt to you—you have to adapt to Africa. Otherwise you’ll destroy yourself."

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